Horse Racing Tracker Instructions

 
 

 

How it works

The Horse Racing tracker extracts data from the Bookmakers and benchmarks this first against the exchange win and place markets. Where liquidity is low it will use best book price (BBP) at the bookmakers adjusted for overrounds.

Image

Using the trackers

There are two main pages of interest, the first is the Race List, this allows you to look into the value on a particular race and can be useful if there is a particular big event you want to focus on. The second is the Racing Tracker itself and this is the page you will want to visit the most. This page tracks the day’s value across all the races making it easy to select a few horses from a particular bookmaker and take advantage of compounding by putting these into a system bet such as a Lucky 15 or Lucky 31.

Menus

At the top of the page there are the following menu buttons;

  • Racing Tracker – This takes you to a summary page with all the races listed. You can drill into each individual race to see the value on each horse.
  • Race List – Each Race of the day is listed. We can click into a page showing each individual race, with all the horses in that race ranked by EV.
  • My Bets – a page that shows the horses we have saved to “My Bets”
  • Hidden runners – a list of all of the horses we have hidden
  • Race Meetings – a bespoke tool for summary data within a meeting. See the notes below.
  • My Settings – a page to calibrate the data that is presented on the racing tracker

My Settings

  • Settings – This page allows you adjust the tracker to your own requirements, the settings are as follows:
  • My Online/Shop Books – Add the books you want to see on the tracker here, this also populates the drop down menu on the Racing EV Finder so you can quickly sort by bookmaker.
  • Display Settings – Extra Columns – Select or deselect these to customise your results.
  • Show only best EV runner from each race – Tick this box to exclude the lower EV horses in each race, useful when putting together an accumulator/system bet.
  • EV Listing View – Choose compact, detailed or minimal dependent on your preference for displaying the bookmaker info on the right side of the tracker.
  • Filters – This page allows some further tweaks to your results…
      • Filter odds above – Enter a figure here to see only results below this amount.
      • Filter win arbs – Tick this to exclude all results where the bookmaker win price is above the win fair odds.
      • Show EP races only – Select this to only see races where bookmakers are offering extra place concessions
  • Data Models – The following data models can be selected on the tracker:

    • Default – The default metric uses Lay, Last Traded Price, BBP, Default Win/Lay and BBAlgo and applies some logic to determine which is the most appropriate source based on liquidity, liability, market conditions, number of books priced up etc. etc.
    • Lay – The lay metric will take the available lay on Betfair to estimate the fair odds for both Win and Place markets.
    • Last Traded – The last trade metric will take the last traded price on Betfair to estimate the fair odds for both Win and Place markets.
    • BBP – BBP is the Best Bookmaker Price from a range of a bookmakers in the market (with a minimum of 3 bookmakers priced up).
    • Default (Win / Lay) – Default Win Lay uses the “Win Lay” price from Betfair Exchange. The Place price may be from any source, with logic to use the best estimate.
    • BB Algo – The BBAlgo is an estimation of the Place Fair odds through a regression analysis that maps the win fair odds + the number of runners to a historical datbabase of 1.5 million horses. The Win fair odds will come from betfair exchange. Q) Can we provide the exact BB Algorithm? A) We could, but the equation takes up over 500 rows of a webpage.
    • Default No BBP – This metric will aim to use betfair data wherever possible. If betfair is to illquid to estimate a place price then we will switch directlyto the BB Algo without looking at the best bookmaker price.

Racing Tracker

  • + – in the future this will be where you can add the horse to your own record.
  • i – Click the info button to drill into the data for any particular horse.
  • Runner – Name of the horse.
  • EV – Rating returned as a %.
  • Odds – Bookmaker odds.
  • N.Odds – Neutral Odds; prices get cut, this is the level at which we calculate the return to be 100% so you are good to take the bet if it is higher than this.
  • Win F.Odds – The fair odds of the win part of the bet.
  • Place F.Odds – The fair odds of the place part of the bet.
  • Places – The number of places paid by the bookmaker.
  • Terms – The place terms.
  • Race – Time and location of the race.
  • Books – Details of the bookmakers that are offering the quoted prices.
  • OC Update – The time the data was last extracted from OddsChecker.

Image

Race List

  • Title – This column lists all the day’s races by time and includes some quick view symbols that allow you to see where bookmakers are offering extra places (EP); the number of places being paid by standard as stated by the Betfair exchange and the most places offered by the bookmakers.
  • Rating – This column displays a rating bar for each race indication which races we expect to be providing the most value.  The greener the better!
  • Race Start – date and time the race is scheduled to start.
  • Runners – The number of runners in the race.
  • Best Rating – This returns the rating of the best value horse at any particular time.
  • Race EV tracker – Click this link to view the individual race.
  • Updated – This is the time the fair odds were last updated for each race.

Image

BB Algo

There are times when there is just not enough data available to calculate the place odds, this particularly affects those races where bookmakers are offering additional extra places. For example a bookmaker may offer to pay out each way bets up to 7 places on a big race at Cheltenham and there may not be an equivalent 7TBP market at Betfair or via Best Book Prices (BBP). For this instance we have carried out an extensive study into historical data covering all UK and Ireland races since 2007.

We have analysed the finishing positions of 1,512,665 horses and categorised them by number of horses in each race and split these into SP bands. From this we can tell that in 16 horse races a horse with odds of 13.5 would have finished in the top 4 28% of the time. This allows us to fill in the gaps when a better metric isn’t available.

The Algorithm has certain limitations that it can’t deal with which is why we will always want to default to the usual metrics when these are available. The main downside is that it doesn’t adjust for the shape of the field, there may be an unusually short favourite, or a lack of the usual outsiders. For this reason it should be used for highlighting value, members should make their own assessments as to whether these horses should be included on their bet slips (as with all bets!).

Horses on the tracker that are using the BB Algo will show the lowest level of confidence so they can be picked out at a glance from the tracker.

To see these results members will need to turn the BB Algo option on under ‘My Settings’

Confidence

This is the logic in the Horse Racing Tracker for Confidence: All prices refer to Place probability.

  • Confidence 1 (Green and full) If the back/lay difference is less then 6% use the back/lay middle. If there are more than 4 last trades and the min/max of those last trades difference is less than 20% use the Last Traded price.
  • Confidence 2 (Green) Else if the market overround is greater than 90% and the back/lay difference is less then 20%. If the last trade is between the back/lay use that else use the lay minus 30% the back / lay difference.
  • Confidence 3 (Blue) Else if the market overround is greater than 75% and the back/lay difference is less then 25% – if the  last trade is between back/lay use that else use the lay minus 20% of the back / lay diff
  • Confidence 4 (Yellow) Else if the Best Bookmaker Price for Place exists use that
  • Confidence 5 (Red) Else use the BBAlgo. Quality check if the default price is less than the back price then use the back price.  if the default price is greater than the lay price use the lay.

Results

A results page is here

A blog reviewing the 1 year results is here

Live prices

The tracker extracts data from Betfair as well as from bookies and third parties. 

Known Issues

The data is only as good as the feed provided to OddsChecker by the bookmakers. There are occasions when this causes false positives which is a pain but you won’t be able to bet on them at that price. We try and mitigate for these but sometimes to avoid missing out on value, we have to accept that some of these will creep in.

Race Meeting Tool

We have a detailed tool for looking at what is going on across meetings with favourite performance, jockey performance etc. See here for notes on how this works.

Feedback and Requests

Feedback and requests can be provided to Basher Lee on Discord.

FAQs

Q) What does C Mean on the tracker?

Confidence, from 1 (most confident) to 4 (least confident). 5 is BBalgo. If it’s red that’s BB Algo, yellow and almost empty is least confident up to green and full being most confident.

Q) What is the best time of the day to use the tracker?

Any time value is available. Morning prices are more likely to be significantly higher than SP, whereas late prices are more likely to be shaped by smart money. Both morning and late prices have advantages and disadvantages. We have not seen evidence that one is more profitable than the other.

Q) How reliable is the BBAlgo?

The BBAlgo has returned 3.7% ROI since we started recording, from March until September 2021. This is marginally under the 5.1% ROI of the overall horse racing tracker.

Q) Isn’t this just Arbing?

No. We encourage users to turn off Win Arbs, and we actively seek to find value in markets that do not have any liquidity.

Q) Will my account get restricted?

A system that allows you to win indefinitely at the bookmaker does not exist. The sheer act of withdrawing profit from the bookmaker in the long run will lead to restrictions, regardless of our actions. However there are a few things we can do to delay restrictions as long as possible; filtering out Win Arbs, placing multiples and utilising the BBAlgo are all activities that can delay account restrictions.

Q) Should I bet over 110% EV?

This depends on your risk tolerance. Betting over 110% would have achieved a 33% ROI over the year. Betting over 100% would have achieved a 5% ROI. Betting over 104% would have achieved a 14% ROI. Including a horse under 100% EV in a Lucky 15 will likely still produce a +EV betslip, and the -EV horse may help delay account restrictions.  Betting at lower levels allows you to get more volume down potentially increasing your profits despite the lower ROI.

Q) Can I bet on the Exchange?

The power of smart money results in steamers. We have seen evidence with other trackers at bookiebashing.net that betting on steamers on the exchange yields a positive ROI over a large sample size. We are currently monitoring the horse racing tracker to see if the same positive ROI is achievable. For now, we recommend that all bets are placed at bookmakers with matching place terms.

Q) Which shops match online prices?

Betfred and Paddy Power will usually match the online prices, William Hill are less consistent, we spend very little time visiting Ladbrokes or Coral.

We place a lot of Lucky 15s on WH SSBTs as it is very easy to see if the live price will match our tracker or not.

Q) How is EV Calculated?

We estimate the price of every horse finishing in 1->nth position. We compare this against the place terms and odds available at the bookmaker. We produce an EV rating by dividing the bookmaker probability by the fair odds (for both Win and Place).

EV = (Book Win odds) / (Fair Win odds) + (Book palce odds / Fair place odds) / 2

Q) Why place multiples instead of singles?

Primarily to compound EV. Placing two 103% EV singles in a double results in a 109% EV bet. Lucky 15s, Lucky 31s and lucky 63s compound the value we are getting on each horse, and have the potential to return a jackpot payday.

An added bonus is for account preservation, sticking your horses into an ACCA or System Bet will reduce the chance of receiving the dreaded email as multiples are much harder to lay off.You will also find enhancements available on bets such as lucky 15s in certain shops where they will pay out additional amounts if only one horse wins or if they all win.  These enhancements can be big for the EV you achieve.  Have a play around with the System Bets calculator to see the effect.

Q) Should I lay my bets?

The tracker isn’t designed for this and we do not recommend it as you will be wasting time and eroding the value by doing so.  We prefer the use of good bankroll management and appropriate staking.